No more Wamu

I'm sad that Wamu failed. I still don't understand how the FDIC took it down in one fell swoop in August and sold it off for an insanely low amount. There must have been some interesting politics involved. It was the biggest bank failure in recent history.

Well, Chase bought Wamu. From August to May, they left the name Washington Mutual up, and they kept the website up. I could pretend that Wamu was still alive. I was in such denial that I thought Wamu would redeem itself somehow.

And last week Chase removed all the Wamu signs. They switched us all over to the Chase site to view our accounts. It's the last nail in the coffin.

Funny how I've been avoiding going to the Chase website. I have bills to pay, money to transfer, accounts to balance, and I've been in pure denial mode. Til it's practically the end of the month, and I really need to start paying some things.

I have a Chase credit card, and when I logged into the credit card, it pulled up the bank accounts as well. Cool, they identified me. Before I give them too much credit, I'm sure they only linked because it's the same social security number. When I try my Wamu login and password, I see the same accounts. So I have 2 separate logins for the same accounts. Weird. But okay.

What irks me about the Chase website is that it's one of those super secure websites. Yeah, yeah, they're concerned about my identity. That's nice and all. But it's a pain in the butt when you're on vacation and trying to pay your credit card from a different computer. And now it will be a pain in the butt to even look at a bank account balance. They make you activate the computer by sending special codes to your e-mail, and then you have to answer all the secret questions. It makes it problematic because I use my hotmail account, and you can't get into hotmail from a lot of computers. So, in short, their activation process sucks.

But there is one redeeming feature on the Chase website. We have a lot of different accounts - my checking, S checking, joint checking, joint savings, my savings, S savings, Julia savings, plus some more. Get it? That's a lot of accounts. I tend to do a lot of transfers among accounts for lots of different reasons. There's usually a method to my madness, but sometimes when I look back at the log, I'm thinking to myself, "What were all these transfers for????" On the Chase site, you can write yourself a memo for each transfer. That will be very helpful to recreate what happened several months later.

I will miss you, Wamu. You've been a great banking partner for 18 years. It's time for us both to move on. Please know that I will never forget your loyal service.